GE's New Holographic Optical Disk May Open New Doors in Consumer, Enterprise Storage - Page 2

A Potential Game-Changing Development?Does this holographic disk storage breakthrough have the potential to be a game-changing one in any of the markets?"Game changing? While everyone likes to say change is constant, it's also true that one constant is inertia," Enterprise Strategy Group storage analyst Mark Peters told eWEEK."Nothing changes overnight. IT has a lot invested [both hardware and knowledge] in the traditional way of doing things. However, this does sound interesting."Although the talk about the new high-capacity disks is about potential capacities and price points, it doesn't talk about that other key aspect-performance, Peters said."However-and making a lot of assumptions around reliability, longevity, interoperability, etc.-where a large, cheap serial/random access device could have a role is as a competitor to large HDDs [hard disk drives]," Peters said."This could be heightened as SSDs [solid-state drives] gradually take the I/O load and leave the capacity load to disks. Frankly, whether the less active, persistent data is on a traditional HDD, a new microholographic platter or my dinner plate doesn't matter, as long as it fulfills the basic requirements at the best price."Specific markets for the high-capacity disks will be determined by their actual and eventual attributes, Peters said. However, the portability of such media makes for a wide range of options beyond traditional data center environments, he added."I guess I'm not going to change my expectations just yet. There's also, for example, a long way to go with solid-state storage-and not just as SSDs," Peters said."Remember that it's only a few years ago that any of us were thrilled to get a USB storage stick as a 'freebie,' and now we're drowning under them. Solid state-and even spinning technologies, such as vertical recording-has the potential to grow exponentially, too, in the time it will take for this holographic technology to become commercially viable."Bottom line? Interesting."

Chris J. Preimesberger

Chris J. Preimesberger is Editor-in-Chief of eWEEK and responsible for all the publication's coverage. In his 15 years and more than 4,000 articles at eWEEK, he has distinguished himself in reporting...

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